


Roots

by novelDaydreamer



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: AU, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-07-08 20:49:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19875880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novelDaydreamer/pseuds/novelDaydreamer
Summary: Gil doesn't overhear the location of the student records. Thanks to an obscure Genealogy Spark, certain discoveries occur anyway.Tarvek has a decision to make.





	Roots

"Gil. _Gil_ _!_ "

Gill lifted his head out of the blankets and blinked at him, muzzy-eyed. "What?"

"Come with me," Tarvek whispered. "I need to show you something.

They padded down the hall in silence, Tarvek due to early Smoke Knight training, and Gil due to practice and a natural instinct to copy what worked. Tarvek didn't answer any questions until they were safely tucked away in an alcove, higher than eye level for an adult and in an access corridor that was rarely used anyway. Gil waited, more or less impatiently.

It was hard to stage a dramatic reveal where you pulled something out of your shirt, but Tarvek tried anyway. "This," he whispered, "is Richter's Heritage Paper."

Gil stared down at the wrinkled card, blank but for borders decorated by twining vines and lovingly illustrated splashes of blood.

"Am I supposed to know what that is?"

Tarvek huffed, disgruntled. "Well… no, I guess not," he allowed. "It's not _common_. Actually it's banned by the Fifty Families, so I would want to hear about it if you had seen it before."

Gil looked at the paper with new wariness, scooting back a little on the girder. "Why's it banned?"

"Because this is _sparkwork_ _,_ " Tarvek said grandly. "It shows a totally accurate record of the parentage of anyone whose blood falls on it." Which had caused quite a number of upsets in the months after it had been created, before the originating Spark had been assassinated. Most of the Fifty Families would much rather have their indiscretions buried, potentially literally.

But the hope growing in Gil's eyes was worth the potential trouble if anyone traced this sheet back to him.

"So I just get blood on it?" 

"Just a couple drops. Hang on, I have a knife -"

Gil had already swiped his hand against a rough-edged bolt on the girder. "Here," he said, holding it out.

"That's unsanitary!" Tarvek hissed in outrage. He grabbed the slightly grubby hand, examining the ragged tear just under the base of the pinky. "We'll need to clean that after we get back."

"I could have done it by accident, come _on_ _._ " Gil reached for the paper.

"Wait!" Tarvek grabbed Gil's hand again. Carefully, he pressed the edge of it to the top of the paper and examined the oblong smear it left behind. "This is enough," he said, as the blood started absorbing into the fibres.

Gil pressed close, hand ignored as he stared intently over Tarvek's shoulder. "How long will it take?"

"Just a few seconds. It only shows names, not pictures or anything, but if neither of us recognizes them, we can start research…"

Even as Tarvek spoke, the blood was being drawn down to form recognizable letters. One of them was unreadable, glyphs from a language that Tarvek had never encountered. But the other…

He stared.

In the crumbling ruins of his hopes and plans, a number of pieces clicked together.

"...What?" Gil whispered, stunned.

The sound jolted Tarvek into moving. He crumpled the paper, hiding the betraying _Baron Klaus Wulfenbach_ in definitely-not-shaking fists. "We have to burn this."

"But it can't be-"

"Shhh!" Tarvek made a sharp cutting motion with his free hand. "Don't _say_ it."

"But-"

"It doesn't _matter_ if it's true if people _think_ it's true."

But it made sense, a horrible, cold, cruel kind of sense. Why keep a boy with no known connections with the future leaders of Europa? So he could evaluate them before they knew to be wary of him. Even the frequent trips to medical took on a new light - not a disposable test subject, but a _project_ , from a man who didn't even blink at altering _himself_ _._

"What happens if people think it's true?" Gil poked him in the side.

"They try to _kill_ you, now _stop talking about it._ "

That apparently gave Gil enough to think about. He followed behind quietly as Tarvek tracked down an empty lab with a Bunsen burner and helped him sift through the tiny pile of ashes to ensure that nothing betraying the paper's original purpose remained, before flushing them down three different sinks. That _should_ prevent them from being reconstituted, by any method Tarvek knew, which meant that the only potential leaks were from Tarvek and Gil himself.

"You can't tell _anyone_ _,_ " he told Gil once they were back in the access corridors. "I mean it. Even if they're being insulting about your family, or doubting that you're going to be a spark or something, you can't say _anything_ _._ You can't even hint that you might _know_ anything." Tarvek grimaced. "I'm going to have to teach you how to lie better."

"But why wouldn't he tell me?"

Wasn't it obvious? Tarvek studied Gil's face, and the slow heartbreak spreading across it, and decided now was not the time to educate him about need-to-know information. "He was probably going to tell you eventually," he said instead. "You'd be…" Tarvek looked around; leaned into Gil's ear and lowered his voice to a bare murmur. "You'd be no good as an heir, otherwise."

Gil's eyes went wide as he processed that. "A _what_ _?_ But I don't -" He apparently possessed some secret-keeping instincts, because he cut himself off before finishing the thought. Tarvek watched distantly as emotions warred on Gil's face, finally settling on an intimidated kind of fear. "It's so… big."

And didn't _that_ just make plans fall into place.

"You don't have to do it alone," he said, and watched the relief take over Gil's expression. "Now come on, we still have to clean your hand before we go to bed."

Half an hour later, Tarvek stared at his ceiling, thoughts spinning too quickly to sleep.

Gil was the Baron's son. _Gil_ was the Baron's son. Gil was the son and (probably) heir of the usurper who had conquered Europa.

And he didn't want to be.

Oh, a big part of it was probably the shock of finding out that he was actually _somebody_ _._ And… well, Gil probably wouldn't be a _bad_ ruler. Better than a lot of Tarvek's cousins, once he got used to the idea. But he didn't… it wasn't his dream. 

Gil had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, for someone who hadn't been brought up to rule. He'd _do_ it. But if he had another option, somebody he knew he could pass the empire onto…

If Tarvek could convince the Baron's heir to give up the empire to its proper king, there wouldn't even have to be a war.


End file.
